What's the difference between amnesty and forgiveness?

Amnesty


Definition:

  • (v.) Forgetfulness; cessation of remembrance of wrong; oblivion.
  • (v.) An act of the sovereign power granting oblivion, or a general pardon, for a past offense, as to subjects concerned in an insurrection.
  • (v. t.) To grant amnesty to.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It is Cruz, a longtime critic of so-called “amnesty” policies, who has spent the greater part of the debate’s aftermath seeking to clarify his position.
  • (2) Amnesty International supports the development of a treaty on business and human rights because we believe states must fulfil their duty to protect people against all human rights abuses, including those caused by corporate abuse and negligence.
  • (3) "If at any time we had been presented with a scheme that in any way amounted to immunity, exemption or amnesty we would have stopped that scheme - consistent with our opposition to the previous Government's Northern Ireland (Offences) Bill in 2005."
  • (4) The Tony Abbott lecturing the American president on taxation fairness is, of course, the one who as Australian prime minister is presiding over policies of taxation amnesty for the richest Australians who have themselves offshored their hidden wealth, capping their taxable liability to merely the last four years.
  • (5) Would Amnesty prefer that no further training was given?
  • (6) We should also have met people who know about the country – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and in particular the UN special rapporteur, who we could have confronted with our new knowledge,” says Olsen.
  • (7) The report reveals a pattern of frequent Israeli attacks using large aerial bombs to level civilian homes, sometimes killing entire families,” Amnesty said.
  • (8) Hot on the heels of the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai’s 2010 Expo was the biggest in history, spread across an area five times the size of Milan’s exposition at a cost of $50bn (£32bn) – a level of ambition that saw 18,000 families forcibly displaced , according to Amnesty International.
  • (9) According to Amnesty International, the death penalty “is so far removed from any kind of legal parameters that it is almost hard to believe”, with the use of torture to extract confessions commonplace.
  • (10) After his last marathon on Sunday, he will have run more than 2,000 miles, including training, and raised more than £4,000 for Amnesty International and WfWI.
  • (11) Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International USA’s security and human rights programme, acknowledged the need for governments to assess their approach in the aftermath of major attacks but said: “What we don’t want to see is government using the Paris attacks as a pretext for extending surveillance authorities or pushing back against reforms that even the government acknowledged as necessary.” Some of the hawkish responses to events in Paris “raise a question of whether there’s an exploiting of public fear and anger and anxiety to push legislation through”, she added.
  • (12) After their arrests, the brothers were kept for several months in solitary confinement and later sentenced to prison after what Amnesty International described as a one-day "unfair trial".
  • (13) As a result, the only contact some asylum seekers within the centre have with Amnesty International is through intermittent, non-secure internet access and one to two short phone calls outside the centre each week.
  • (14) He also said tax evaders using Liechtenstein had been offered "amnesty-lite" deals.
  • (15) Najia Bounaim, deputy campaigns director at Amnesty International’s Tunis office, said the arrest was “the latest chilling example of the Egyptian authorities’ systematic persecution of independent human rights defenders.” “We believe she has been arrested for her legitimate human rights work and must be released immediately and unconditionally,” she said.
  • (16) I work with a pacifist organisation; I don’t want to feel like I have to prove to everyone that I am worthy of being a member of this society when I have contributed so much.” Members of Amnesty International attended the peaceful demonstration, which drew little attention from the police.
  • (17) Kieron Bryan, a freelance journalist and one of six Britons among the 30 Greenpeace detainees, said that with all the uncertainty about whether or not they would be included in the amnesty, the past week had been hard to cope with: "We've all been feeling the emotional strain this week," he said from St Petersburg.
  • (18) Last December, Northern Ireland's chief law officer, Attorney General John Larkin QC, said there should be no more police investigations, inquiries or even inquests into killings related to the conflict prior to the 1998 peace deal – an effective amnesty for all Troubles crimes.
  • (19) Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said: “Chelsea Manning exposed serious abuses, and as a result her own human rights have been violated by the US government for years.
  • (20) However in a statement released in response to the Amnesty International report, corrective services minister Joe Francis said the government makes “no apology for detaining young people who commit violent crimes,” and suggested all Aboriginal young people who are currently in detention are either serving a sentence or are on remand for “extremely serious crimes,” including murder.

Forgiveness


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of forgiving; the state of being forgiven; as, the forgiveness of sin or of injuries.
  • (n.) Disposition to pardon; willingness to forgive.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) One of the most interesting aspects of the shadow cabinet elections, not always readily interpreted because of the bizarre process of alliances of convenience, is whether his colleagues are ready to forgive and forget his long years as Brown's representative on earth.
  • (2) In 1999, Kamprad admitted his past involvement with Nazism in a book about his life and asked for forgiveness for his "stupidity."
  • (3) Perhaps he is instinctively more forgiving about avoiding tax, which some right-wingers always regard as an indecent affront, than the free use of public funds.
  • (4) He argues that whenever you have periods of crazy expansion of virtual credit, like today, you either have to have a safety valve of forgiveness, like in Mesopotamia where you wiped the tablets clean every seven years, or you have an outbreak of social violence so intense you rip society apart.
  • (5) The euro elite insists it is representing the interests of Portuguese or Irish taxpayers who have to pick up the bill for bailing out the feckless Greeks – or will be enraged by any debt forgiveness when they have been forced to swallow similar medicine.
  • (6) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
  • (7) Please, forgive me,” Choi Soon-sil, a cult leader’s daughter with a decades-long connection to Park, said through tears inside the Seoul prosecutor’s building, according to Yonhap news agency.
  • (8) Resisting dictatorships is more worthwhile than accepting them and thinking things will change by themselves.” Asked if the suffering for a majority of South Sudanese citizens could be stopped if Machar and his colleagues gave up the fight, the rebel leader says “giving up would be irresponsible” and that “history would not forgive him” for it.
  • (9) Women are forgiving if you can make it seem like this,” Rock Hard writes.
  • (10) I believe this has made it more possible to forgive.
  • (11) But we’ll know if things have changed when we can walk down the street after dark without being stopped.” Ron McBride, 48, was more forgiving.
  • (12) And it has proved too forgiving of welfare abuse, too obsessed with universal human rights, and too enthusiastic about immigration.
  • (13) Sometimes the public’s legitimate fears are exposed: in Colombia there’s no doubt the public felt uneasy about forgiving Farc for its bloody violence.
  • (14) The hardest thing is forgiving yourself, but it is necessary to do that.” As for the rest of the world and its concerns, Baez is willing to offer her personal support to causes that are particularly close to her heart, most notably the campaign against the death penalty in the United States.
  • (15) Yet in the wake of the second world war, West Germany managed to secure 15bn deutschmarks of debt forgiveness, in what became known as the London agreement.
  • (16) "Forgive me if I'm wrong, but does Crystal Palace-Spurs not count as a London derby?"
  • (17) When Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013, the Sheffield Star led with the headline: “We Will Never Forgive Her” .
  • (18) Both forgiveness and justice were related but distinct constructs.
  • (19) But the journalist Alexander Chancellor, a friend since Cambridge, agrees with Stoppard that despite sometimes sounding "over censorious, he is actually incredibly warm hearted and very forgiving.
  • (20) In return, the survivors were expected to offer forgiveness and the courts to impose lesser sentences, often resulting in immediate release from prison.